Rising Star Restaurateur Jason Bond of Bondir Cambridge - Biography

Growing up in a family of ranchers in Wyoming and Kansas, with a forest ranger grandfather, it was inevitable that Jason Bond would develop a deep relationship with nature. Trading time between two sets of grandparents, one in a town of 2,000 and the other in a town of just 50, Bond also studied classical music, playing stand-up bass and trombone. And while he was engulfed in the Wyoming wilderness, he learned the rhythms of seasonality.

Cuisine surpassed music in Bond’s passions, and he moved eastward in 1995 to pursue it as a career. After studying charcuterie in Paris, Bond returned to the United States, working at No. 9 Park in Boston and the Inn at Little Washington in Virginia (where, before shifts, he would pick watercress and other herbs in the restaurant’s garden). After five years as chef of Boston’s Beacon Hill Bistro, Bond opened Bondir, a small, farmhouse-style restaurant, in 2010.

Not only is Bondir a place where Bond can showcase his philosophy of quality and lineage of product—a “root-cellar” style of cooking—it’s the home base for a network of responsible, local food purveyors (including fishermen who text Bond each morning with their fresh catch). As innovative as he is rooted, Bond has worked with Harvard University to develop recipes for their Science and Cooking class. Nominated for a James Beard Foundation “Best Chef, Northeast,” Bond has plans to add a CSA with produce sourced from the group’s Bondir Gardens in the coming year, in addition to having opened his second restaurant, Bondir Concord in 2013. In 2015, Bond earned a StarChefs Rising Star Restaurateur Award for his work.